But this was no root-and-branch reform such as had taken down the StB agency in Czechoslovakia and the Stasi in East Germany. There were Russians who were interested in going this route. Gavriil Popov asked Yeltsin in the fall of 1991 to make him chairman of the agency. He wanted, Gennadii Burbulis says, to dig out the roots of (vykorchevyvat’) the organization—to pare it down, air its secrets, bring its remnants under strict, many-sided civilian control. Yeltsin was unwilling. To Burbulis, he said that the CPSU had been the country’s brain and the KGB its spinal cord: “And he clearly did not want to rupture the spinal cord now that the head had been lopped off.”78 Yeltsin kept the spinal cord whole out of fear of multiple threats—to political stability, to democracy, to national unity, and to safekeeping of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction.79
A last chance at a more intrusive solution was to be missed in 1993–94. Yeltsin felt let down by the Ministry of Security during his 1993 confrontation with parliament (see Chapter 11). The minister, Viktor Barannikov, a favorite of the president’s dismissed in August 1993 for corruption, defected to the anti-Yeltsin ultras and headed the shadow security department in Aleksandr Rutskoi’s “Provisional Government.” On October 4, 1993, the security forces under a new chief, Nikolai Golushko, permitted dozens of deputies and their armed auxiliaries to flee through underground tunnels.80 In December Yeltsin replaced Golushko with Sergei Stepashin, a former parliamentarian, and issued a statement referring to all changes in the former KGB as having had “a superficial and cosmetic character” with no “strategic concept” behind them.81 He appointed Oleg Lobov to chair a commission to review the force, making Sergei Kovalëv, a Brezhnev-era political prisoner, a member. Kovalëv asked for but did not receive a list of officers who had gone after dissidents in the past. Lobov “said that Boris Nikolayevich did not have in view any radical changes… that we cannot afford to lose professionals.”82 Staff cuts imposed on the FSK were largely reversed by mid-1994. Yeltsin then lapsed back into the confidence that it was enough to subdivide the service—replacing a leviathan with a hydra—place restrictions on surveillance networks, define democratic control as that exercised by him as chief executive, and let sleeping dogs lie. The brotherhood of active and reserve KGB officers, be they engrossed in domestic snooping, foreign spying, or commercial opportunities, persevered. Not until he was a pensioner did Yeltsin confide in Aleksandr Yakovlev that he had “not thought through everything” about the agency and put too much faith in changing the line of command and leaving the essence of the organization intact.83
The last of Yeltsin’s inbuilt resistances was to selling Russian society on the general reform course. Truth be told, he was not well equipped congenitally for outreach. By 1991 he had laid aside the harangues of the CPSU boss for question-and-answer volleys, saucy interviews, campaign oratory, and parliamentary interpellation. He treasured parsimony in speech and literature and loved to pull the printout of a talk from his jacket pocket and chuck it sportily in the wastebasket. Nine times out of ten, it was a masquerade: Either he had memorized the talk and would recite it rote, or he had a variation on the original which he then read out. But Yeltsin as president had to address the nation as a whole, and not merely live audiences, and to mate salesmanship with the dignity of a head of state. This meant working through the mass communications media with which Russia had been imbued under the Soviets. Yeltsin fulfilled the role with a sigh. He did not mind doing in front of television cameras; posing for the blue screen was not his cup of tea.84 Grouchily, he submitted to pancake makeup, a brittle coiffure (the handicraft of a hairdresser inherited from Gorbachev), and a teleprompter. He would fine-tune speeches with the writers, insisting on brevity, some peppy phrases, and pauses for effect. They would coach him on pronunciation and the purging of Urals localisms—such as his rolling of the letter “r,” his flattening of the Russian pronoun chto (what) to shta, and, in press conferences, his elision of the soft vowel “ye” from the expression for “If you know what I mean” (Ponimayesh’ became Ponimash’).85
The problem with Yeltsin as tribune of reform was not that he mishandled any one occasion but that the occasions were intermittent. He did not distill his radical reform into a lapidary phrase such as the New Deal or Great Society. He never related in depth how the economic, social, and political facets of the remaking of Russia cohered. He did not care to take on the task himself and, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff after Yurii Petrov, noted, “He was very jealous when others did it.”86
Yeltsin’s disinclination to promote Yeltsinism stemmed from cognitive dissonance over didactic speeches and from the conviction that empty promises had jaded the population and tarnished both true-blue Soviet leaders and Gorbachev’s perestroika.87 Verbal economy was appropriate in the early days, as his first press officer, Valentina Lantseva, recalled: “Compared to the verbose… Gorbachev, Boris Nikolayevich was closer to the people in his clumsiness [neuklyuzhest’] and bear-like quality [medvezhest’]. He… could answer in one word, yes or no. This was very significant to the people.”88 Once the communist regime was dead, though, Russians wanted to be reassured that their sacrifices were not in vain and to be given signposts for the road ahead. These Yeltsin was not the best person to provide. Hearing Marietta Chudakova advise him at a Kremlin meeting in 1994 to tape a televised presentation every two weeks, he clamped his jaw, after the fashion of someone with a toothache.89 Mark Zakharov, who was at the same meeting, warned of a dearth of ideas and information, which could leave the field to political fanatics and charlatans. Yeltsin countered that any systematic marketing plan would be a warmed-over version of totalitarian brainwashing: “What are you suggesting, that we introduce a ministry of propaganda, like the one under [Joseph] Goebbels?”90 In his 1994 and 2000 memoir volumes, Yeltsin defended his aversion to any idea of “shimmering heights that must be scaled.” No bombast was needed. “Propaganda for the new life is superfluous. The new life itself will persuade people that it has become a reality.”91
One part instinct and one part learning from the Soviet past, this was an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bath water. The defense of post-communist reforms was not doomed to excess any more than elimination of the KGB was doomed to unhinge the body politic. Comparative experience teaches that the political bully pulpit has its uses in democracies and not only in tyrannies. In a free polity, loquacity by leaders can go light years to galvanize citizen opinion behind government programs, shape the public sphere, and delimit the range of voices there.92 By selling it short, Yeltsin retarded his ability to make his quiet revolution palatable to the newly enfranchised populace and to enliven the debate about where Russia was headed in the long haul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Falling Apart, Holding Together
When inducted as national leader, Yeltsin intended to stick to economics and treat the structures of government with benign neglect. In retrospect he described this behavior as a mistake: “I probably erred in choosing the economic front as my principal one and leaving governmental reorganization to endless compromises and political games.” It put the economic program itself at risk, since, “without political backup, the Gaidar reforms were left hanging in midair.”1 He soon reconsidered: In order to use the state for his ends, he had to hold it together, and in a way that gave him and not others the steering power.2